Suffocating
by zeldazonk
Summary: The minds of Lux and her sisters have gone soft, and death tastes sweeter than living ever did.


I can't breathe.  There's dust everywhere. I'm suffocating in here. I see it in Mary's sallow skin, Therese's fading hair, Bonnie's dim eyes.  We used to be beautiful, the Lisbon sisters, mythical sirens, and now all we are is dust.  Reflections, glimpses in the windows caked with dirt, flashes of light.  

They think we've lost touch with reality.  Baby, reality left us a long, long time ago, about the time Cecelia carved up her arms Picasso-style and stabbed her heart with the fence.  Gothic.  When the neighbors sent the bouquets we hated, the flowers that made us sick, and Mom played that damn church music all day long, that's when the actuality of day to day life began to flow away.  The things we'd once cared for so much began to flow away as life drove us further from sanity, towards the edge of the windowsill, like it did for Ceel.

I looked for the missing pieces in the ugliest, dirtiest, hardest boys I could find, boys that looked solid and real when nothing else did.  Their roving hands, their hot mouths, their cocks hard, bruising.  The only thing that made me feel real, concrete, was that rhythmic shoving, the pain, the rough texture of shingles against my bare skin.  I lost myself in the pain of it, I felt no pleasure.  Like a child with toys, I threw them away once I tired of them.  Their purpose in life only to prove I was real, that I, Lux Lisbon, existed.  

When the doors closed on our home the final time, and the cobwebs appeared and the stairs creaked and the flies invaded and the trees died and the wax melted, drip drip drip candles a shrine for our sister, the days turned into weeks and the weeks into months, and each day our minds grew softer, hallucinatory.  We dreamed of leaving, slamming the crazy woman and the silent presence of our father into the past.  Filling up trunks and then unpacking them again, things would get better.  Listless, turning the pages of a travel magazine, India and Malaysia.  The dust and dampness turned us into living corpses when we'd once been lively.  

"I'm suffocating in here." Staring out the window, fiddling with the turntable playing Bread on low volume. Mary in her makeup mirror, Therese with her books, does she think she'll ever leave here again? Bonnie, eyes wide and nervous, on the bed.  My sisters, their hair falling out, gray strands in the hairbrush, wan faces and hipbones like knives.  My body, too, like theirs, I watch myself in the mirror.  

I can't recall how it started, the final thoughts of ending it all.  The presence of death flirted with our minds, tasting sweeter than living ever could.  We'd lived, and how great that had been.  We devised plans, plans of pills and nooses and the noxious gas that could steal your breath when the time was right.  We dreamed of it, remembering our small sad-eyed sister and the scars crisscrossing her pearl skin, saw her in the wedding gown with the hem ravaged, shining like the Virgin Mary.  We wanted to shine too, tired of the gray, the damp, the dark, the dust, the silence.  We dreamt of fresh air, blue skies, a place where the trees would survive, the whales wouldn't die, the flies wouldn't coat everything in a blanket of black.  Cecelia's world glittered, so close we could nearly touch it.

The boys.  We knew, oh, we did know, how they watched in our windows, how their messages in the phone were sweet and sincere, they wanted to save us.  Every man has a Prince Charming complex, and four blonde damsels in distress were in dire need of saving.  A bridge over troubled water, dear Prudence, do you know where the children play? Signals from a Chinese lantern, enigmatic messages in their mailboxes.  Oh, save us, save us, take us far away, we pleaded.  Pretending.  We wanted them to see, they didn't know us at all, we had feet of clay, we weren't Greek goddesses or princesses or angels.  We were human; we had been human.  It was the boys we wished to say our final farewell to.

The garage is cold, soundless; my fingers shake turning the key in the ignition.  I imagine my sisters, Therese full of pills, Marilyn Monroe, Mary a Sylvia Plath with her head in the oven among the baked potatoes, Bonnie swaying from her rope, a Salem Witch with skin the color of a Titanic victim, ice blue.  I let the radio play.  _I can't say, baby, where I'll be in a year.  _The scent of smoldering vinyl overpowers me, and the fumes are getting closer.  I remember being a little girl at the seashore.  _Sweet emotion.  _There's a burning sensation in my hand, white hot, but I can't seem to find the source.  I'm numb.  _Your daddy said I took it just a little too far.  _Lightheaded, for the breath is so hard to come by.  I'm suffocating in here.  


End file.
